In the summer of 1982 the first issue of Video Games Player compared the game consoles on sale, and the newest of them got the warmest words. “ColecoVision’s graphics are superb. Just superb,” it wrote. “There’s none of this chunky, angular blocky resolution found in the other games.” Its Donkey Kong was “almost an exact duplicate, graphically as well as in play, of the popular arcade game”, and it came free in the box. For about $60 more, a plug-in module would play every Atari 2600 cartridge on the market.
The ColecoVision came from a Connecticut toy company better known for above-ground swimming pools, and it was a hit. Coleco sold more than half a million in 1982, in the machine’s first five months. Three years later the console was finished and Coleco was heading for bankruptcy, undone partly by the crash that hit the whole American games business and partly by its own home computer, the Adam.
Fast facts
- Maker: Coleco Industries. CBS Electronics sold it outside North America as the CBS ColecoVision.
- Launched: August 1982 in the United States, at about $175. In Britain it cost £149 in 1983.
- CPU: Zilog Z80A at 3.58 MHz.
- Memory: 1K of RAM, an 8K system ROM, cartridges of up to 32K.
- Video: Texas Instruments TMS9928A (a version of the TMS9918A): 256×192 pixels, 15 colours plus transparent, 32 sprites, 16K of video RAM of its own.
- Sound: Texas Instruments SN76489: three square-wave tone channels and one noise channel.
- Controllers: a short joystick above a 12-key keypad, with a fire button on each side.
- Pack-in game: Donkey Kong.
- Sales: Coleco claimed 1.3 million consoles by the autumn of 1983. Later estimates put the total at more than two million.
A toy company’s console
Coleco began as the Connecticut Leather Company, started by Maurice Greenberg in the early 1930s. Video Games traced the business in 1983 from leather goods for shoemakers to Davy Crockett moccasins, and then to above-ground swimming pools. It was not new to video games. After finding Atari’s Pong in the arcades, Maurice’s sons Arnold and Leonard brought out the Telstar in 1976, a console that played only its built-in games. Handheld games soon overshadowed machines like it, and the same article reports that Coleco had to dump more than a million Telstars and came close to bankruptcy in 1978. Handheld and tabletop electronic games kept it going, including tabletop versions of Pac-Man, Galaxian and Donkey Kong.
For its second console, Coleco went after arcade licences. Videogaming Illustrated explained in August 1982 how it won them: the arcade makers had preferred to deal with the market leaders, Atari and Mattel, until Coleco agreed to make cartridges for the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision as well as its own machine. The biggest licence was Donkey Kong. Coleco had won the home rights from Nintendo, as the Donkey Kong and Minoru Arakawa entries tell, and packed the game with every console. Its advertisements listed “‘Donkey Kong,’ America’s #1 arcade game, included with the original purchase” among the machine’s selling points.
The licence also brought Coleco trouble before the console was even in the shops. In April 1982, as the Universal vs Nintendo entry describes, Universal City Studios claimed that Donkey Kong infringed its rights in King Kong. Coleco settled within days and paid Universal a royalty, while Nintendo fought and won. Coleco later recovered what it had paid.
What was inside
The ColecoVision was built from parts anyone could buy. Coleco’s Technical Manual names a Zilog Z80A, clocked at 3.58 MHz by halving the frequency of a crystal oscillator, a Texas Instruments 9928 video display processor with 16K of its own video RAM, and a TI 76489 sound generator. Sega’s SG-1000 console used the same video and sound chips, and the TMS9918 family later went into the MSX computers.
The Z80 itself had very little memory. The manual lists an 8K system ROM holding “frequently used sub-routines”, 1K of RAM for “scores, motion variables, etc.”, and a cartridge slot that could address up to 32K of ROM in four 8K banks. The picture did not have to fit in that 1K. The video chip kept its own 16K, which the Z80 reached only through the chip’s ports, a byte at a time.
For games, the manual says, the video chip ran in its Graphics I mode: 256×192 pixels built from 8×8 character patterns, “in 15 colors plus transparent”, with 32 sprites on top. Texas Instruments’ data manual adds the limit programmers had to work around: “Only four sprites can be active on any horizontal line.” Any more on that line are “automatically made transparent”, so games with crowded rows of enemies had to make them take turns, and they flickered.
The chip’s frame interrupt is wired to the Z80’s non-maskable interrupt, which the manual describes as “a pulse to the CPU approximately every 1/60 second”. Because the processor cannot switch that interrupt off, a game has to be ready for it at any moment, or turn it off at the video chip instead.
The SN76489 has three square-wave tone channels and a noise generator, each with its own volume setting. It has no envelopes, so a program shapes every note by rewriting the volume as it plays.
The controllers were busy. Each had a short joystick and two side buttons above a twelve-key keypad that took printed overlays, and a 60-pin connector on the front of the console carried the whole processor bus to whatever Coleco chose to plug in.
Playing Atari’s games
That connector was the point of Coleco’s first add-on. Expansion Module #1 slid into the front of the console and took Atari 2600 cartridges. Its manual promises that it “lets you play all Atari VCS compatible cartridges”, with Atari’s own joysticks or the ColecoVision controllers. Video Games Player called it “a very smart thing”: ColecoVision owners now had “the most comprehensive software library of any other system”, although the Atari games looked no better than before. Barbara Wruck, Coleco’s director of marketing services, told Videogaming Illustrated the plan was to let Atari owners “trade up” to a ColecoVision without giving up their cartridges.
Atari did not agree. In December 1982, Video Games reported, Atari sued Coleco for patent infringement and unfair competition over the module, and Coleco answered the same day with an antitrust suit, the two claims adding up to $850 million. Coleco followed the module with the Gemini, a stand-alone 2600-compatible console. The companies settled in the spring of 1983. Arnold Greenberg told Video Games that Coleco would go on making both the module and the Gemini “under a royalty-paid license under the Atari patents”, and Electronic Games welcomed the deal as a sign that the two firms could settle their differences out of court.
Expansion Module #2 was a steering wheel, dashboard and accelerator pedal that came with Sega’s racing game Turbo. Coleco also sold a trackball, the Roller Controller, and the Super Action Controllers, pistol-grip controllers with a speed roller for sports games.
The games
Coleco published most of the early games itself, and almost all of them came from the arcades. Videogaming Illustrated listed the 1982 line-up: Donkey Kong, Exidy’s Venture, Mouse Trap and Side Trak, Sega’s Zaxxon and Carnival, Universal’s Lady Bug, and Smurf, which Coleco hoped would bring in children who had never owned a console. In September 1983 Video Games Player reported Coleco’s best-sellers as, in order, Zaxxon, Smurf, Lady Bug and Carnival. Parker Brothers, Activision and others added their own conversions, among them Activision’s Pitfall!.
The console’s success brought complaints of its own. In May 1983 Electronic Games reported that Coleco had “heard wails from its 600,000 or so ColecoVision owners concerning the need for more cartridges”. By its count there had been about half a million ColecoVisions in American homes at the end of 1982, against some twenty times as many Atari 2600s.
The Adam
Coleco had promised at launch that the ColecoVision would become a computer: Videogaming Illustrated reported in August 1982 that a module to turn it into one would follow the next year. Coleco showed it at the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1983. Just before the show, Video Games expected a $200 computer module with a printer, to make a $375 system with the console. The Adam that Electronic Fun described that August cost $600 as a complete computer and $400 as Expansion Module #3 for an existing console. Either way it came with 80K of RAM, a keyboard, a daisywheel printer, a tape drive for Coleco’s Digital Data Pack cassettes, a word processor and a Buck Rogers game.
It did not arrive on time. In December 1983 Videogaming Illustrated reported that Coleco had stopped making ColecoVisions to concentrate on the Adam, that the Adam had shown glitches at each demonstration, and that analysts reckoned Coleco lost 100,000 sales for every month it slipped past its September target. Looking back in February 1985, Video Games Player said Coleco had missed its release date by about four months and that “30% of the first Adams turned out to be defective”. By then, it said, the problems had been fixed, and “the only thing holding back Adam is its reputation.”
The end, and after
The American video game market collapsed in 1983 and 1984, as the 1983 crash entry describes. Coleco had a hit of another kind, the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, which Video Games Player called “the biggest thing since the Hula Hoop”, but public sources report that it discontinued the Adam in January 1985 and the ColecoVision later that year. Coleco filed for bankruptcy in 1988, and Hasbro bought most of its remaining product lines in 1989.
The console’s library lived on. Games came out on compilations for Windows in the late 1990s, AtGames sold a ColecoVision Flashback with 60 built-in games in 2014, and homebrew programmers still write new cartridges for it, using the same Z80, TMS9918 and SN76489 that they can also program on the Sega SG-1000 and MSX.
Sources
- Coleco Industries, ColecoVision Technical Manual (1982), section III, “Theory of Operation”, pp. III-1 to III-6: the five parts of the system and the 60-pin expansion connector; the Z-80A and its clock; the 9928 VDP, Graphics I mode, 15 colours plus transparent, 32 sprite planes, 16K of VRAM and the NMI “approximately every 1/60 second”; the 76489 sound generator; the 8K system ROM, cartridges “up to 32K” in 8K banks, and 1K of RAM; the hand controller interface.
- Texas Instruments, TMS9918A/TMS9928A/TMS9929A Video Display Processors Data Manual (1982), section 2: the fifth sprite flag (p. 2-11); “Only four sprites can be active on any horizontal line” and extra sprites “made transparent” (p. 2-16); the interrupt enable bit in register 1.
- Texas Instruments, SN76489AN data sheet: three programmable tone generators, a noise generator and programmable attenuation.
- Coleco Industries, Expansion Module #1 Owner’s Manual (1982): “Lets you play all Atari VCS compatible cartridges”.
- Video Games Player vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982, p. 60: “superb” graphics, Donkey Kong, the Atari expansion module, prices.
- Videogaming Illustrated, August 1982, pp. 22–25, feature on Coleco: Telstar and the 1977 Christmas, the tabletop games, the licences and the cartridges for Atari and Intellivision, the 1982 ColecoVision games, Donkey Kong packed with the console, the Smurfs, the computer module planned for 1983.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 2, October 1982: Coleco’s ColecoVision advertisement.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 6, March 1983, p. 80, “Atari v. Coleco & Imagic”: Atari’s suit over Module #1, Coleco’s antitrust suit, $850 million.
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 15, May 1983, p. 30: “600,000 or so ColecoVision owners”.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 9, June 1983, pp. 22–26, profile of and interview with Arnold Greenberg: Coleco’s history from leather to pools, Telstar and the 1978 losses, the ColecoVision’s launch and 1982 sales at $175, CBS as foreign distributor, the planned $375 computer, the settlement with Atari and the Gemini.
- TV Gamer, June 1983: Silica Shop advertisement, CBS ColecoVision at £149 including VAT.
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 17, July 1983, p. 113: about half a million ColecoVisions in American homes at the end of 1982, and twenty times as many 2600s.
- Videogaming Illustrated, July 1983, pp. 31–32: Barbara Wruck on the “Atari Conversion Module” and letting Atari owners “trade up”; the Roller Controller as a trackball; the Turbo module.
- Coleco Industries, Super Action Controller Set User’s Manual (1982): the snap-on pistol grips.
- Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 6, August 1983, p. 6, editorial: the Atari–Coleco settlement and royalty.
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games vol. 1 no. 10, August 1983, news pages: “Coleco’s Adam is finally here”, $600 and $400, 80K of RAM, the printer, word processor and Buck Rogers.
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games vol. 1 no. 11, September 1983: the Adam’s Digital DataPak.
- Video Games Player vol. 2 no. 1, September 1983, p. 31, “The Hotline”: Coleco’s best-selling games and “1.3 million ColecoVisions sold so far”.
- Videogaming Illustrated, December 1983, pp. 20–22: the Adam’s delays, glitches and the halt in ColecoVision production.
- Video Games Player (Computer Games) vol. 3 no. 5, February 1985, pp. 30–33, review of the year: the Adam four months late and “30% of the first Adams” defective; the Cabbage Patch Kids.
- Wikipedia, “ColecoVision” and “Coleco” (web, secondary): the August 1982 launch, total sales of more than two million, the discontinuation of the Adam in January 1985 and of the ColecoVision in 1985, the Connecticut Leather Company name and its founding in 1932, the 1988 bankruptcy, Hasbro’s purchase in 1989, later compilations and the 2014 Flashback. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColecoVision and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco